Unfortunately this doesn’t mean that anything is actually being done about it. As I blogged a couple of days ago, we are going to start paying considerably more for water over a base “ration” of 2.5 m3 a person a month.

However collecting more money for water will not magically refill the aquifers. Demand for water is not that elastic and with little public awareness and only twelve inspectors to enforce watering bans over the whole country, even the water authority optimists are only expecting to make up about a third of the 100 M m3 shortfall.

So what are we going to do. We can pray and hope that we won’t run out of water or do irreversable ecological damage before the overdue desalination plants come on line starting in 2010.